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7ec5552
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I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
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Nicholson Baker |
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613b6a7
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But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.
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life
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Nicholson Baker |
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0eb0f06
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Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which..
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Nicholson Baker |
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8ed6c1b
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You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.
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Nicholson Baker |
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829cb93
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The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well--the rest no longer seems pressing..
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Nicholson Baker |
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a73c173
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Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.
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Nicholson Baker |
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33c8b38
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That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
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Nicholson Baker |
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e5719e7
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You need the art in order to love the life.
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Nicholson Baker |
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4ad98ff
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It's time for bed. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.
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humor
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Nicholson Baker |
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c3c537a
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Poetry is prose in slow motion.
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prose
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Nicholson Baker |
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5d97a79
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A bee rose up from a sun-filled paper cup, off to make slum honey from some diet root beer it had found inside.
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Nicholson Baker |
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0d61eda
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Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paper and cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped wood fiber.
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Nicholson Baker |
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de842f4
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I don't think that loneliness is necessarily a bad or unconstructive condition. My own skill at jamming time may actually be dependent on some fluid mixture of emotions, among them curiosity, sexual desire, and love, all suspended in a solvent medium of loneliness. I like the heroes or heroines of books I read to be living alone, and feeling lonely, because reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness. Loneliness makes you ..
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sex
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Nicholson Baker |
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d62d507
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At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention..
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Nicholson Baker |
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dc567c2
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And then a man of forty or so, with a French accent, asked, "How do you achieve the presence of mind to initiate the writing of a poem?" And something cracked open in me, and I finally stopped hoarding and told them my most useful secret. The only secret that has helped me consistently over all the years that I've written. I said, "Well, I'll tell you how. I ask a simple question. I ask myself: What was the very best moment of your day??" T..
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Nicholson Baker |
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91b13af
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So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match s..
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Nicholson Baker |
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7966d9e
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There is no good word for ; just as there is no good word for . is to as is to , and as is to , and as is to .
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sex
organs
french
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Nicholson Baker |
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ec31cee
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I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.
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Nicholson Baker |
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5507b54
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you almost believe that you will never come to the end of a roll of tape; and when you do, there is a feeling, nearly, though very briefly, of shock and grief.
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Nicholson Baker |
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fd63d98
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I made an egg salad sandwich and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in.
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Nicholson Baker |
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0e281b3
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Notes of joy have a special STP solvent in them that dissolves all the gluey engine deposits of heartache. War and woe don't have anything like the range and reach that notes of joy do.
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Nicholson Baker |
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4aaf0e0
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The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.
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funny
humor
quirky
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Nicholson Baker |
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232d8dc
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In 1855, as the price of paper rose, Dr. Deck proposed to dig up 2 1/2 million tons of Egyptian mummies, ship them to New York, unroll them; and use their linen wrappings to make paper.
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Nicholson Baker |
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32e5385
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The fact that we had independently decided to sweep our apartments on that Sunday afternoon after spending the weekend together, I took as a strong piece of evidence that we were right for each other. And from then on when I read things Samuel Johnson said about the deadliness of leisure and the uplifting effects of industry, I always nodded and thought of brooms.
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ridiculous-things
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Nicholson Baker |
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9c23f72
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There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he'd collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey--that would be an achievement. But collecting your own poems? What's s..
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Nicholson Baker |
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2860841
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One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to "faire le parachutisme." He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. It sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said "I'm not a homo." I said it's not a question of whether or not you're a homo, I just don't want to jump out of a plane."
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Nicholson Baker |
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a51b262
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You've got to get cold to get warm," Phoebe said. Now that is the truth. That is so true about so many things. You learn it first with sheets and blankets: that the initial touch of the smooth sheets will send you shivering, but their warming works fast, and you must experience the discomfort to find the later contentment. It's true with money and love, too. You've got to save to have something to spend. Think of how hard it is to ask out a..
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warm
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Nicholson Baker |
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f236df6
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Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it's just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and the sadness of the large naked swinging breasts and soft olive skin and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know.
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singer
brazil
saudades
victoria-de-los-angeles
latin
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Nicholson Baker |
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0fe58d9
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All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are gong to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy work that is, 'divulge.' Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.
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Nicholson Baker |
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bae7d5f
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There is a feeble urgency behind all forced mannerisms of finery- haste and pomp cannot coincide.
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Nicholson Baker |
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3588109
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Will you dance for me? Let your breasts roam for a moment -- I need to see how they dance.' 'Okay.' She danced, and as she danced, she tried to think of the most delicious salads she could imagine -- with artichokes and sundried tomato and blue cheese dressing, and beets, lots of beets.
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sex
humor
beets
salad
vegetarianism
erotica
food
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Nicholson Baker |
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f13f0db
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Who cares about my cock? It'll fend for itself.
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Nicholson Baker |
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fd59704
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And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an impostor, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.
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Nicholson Baker |
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95e5f0b
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And now I'm back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bit me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They're just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.
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Nicholson Baker |
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8260d92
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In old stapled problems, you can see the TB vaccine marks in the upper left corner where the staples have been removed and replaced, as the problem - even the staple holes of the problem - was copied and sent on to other departments for further action, copying, and stapling.
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Nicholson Baker |
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b77839d
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You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
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Nicholson Baker |
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8f183a8
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The damage that you have inflicted heals over, and the scarred places left behind have unusual surface areas, roughnesses enough to become the nodes around which wisdom weaves its fibrils.
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Nicholson Baker |
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a921692
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Though simple, the trick was something that struck me as useful . Thus, the 'when I was little' nostalgia was misleading: it turned something that I was taking seriously as an adult into something soupier, less precise, more falsely exotic, than it really was. Why should we need lots of nostalgia to license any pleasure taken in the discoveries we carry over from childhood, when it is now so clearly an adult pleasure? I decided that from n..
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Nicholson Baker |
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bd2bb38
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Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.
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Nicholson Baker |
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7b957a0
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When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can't throw them out-- they and the nameplate and a few sample payroll stubs are proof to yourself that you once showed up at that building every day and solved complicated, utterly absorbing problems there; unfortunately, the problems themselves, though..
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work
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Nicholson Baker |
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5fd4656
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Gerard Manley Hopkins somewhere describes how he mesmerized a duck by drawing a line of chalk out in front of it. Think of me as the duck; the chalk, softly wearing itself away against the tiny pebbles embedded in the corporate concrete, is Joyce's forward-luring rough-smooth voice on the cassettes she gives me. Or, to substitute another image, since one is hardly sufficient in Joyce's case, when I let myself really enter her tape, when I l..
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mesmerism
transcription
gerard-manley-hopkins
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Nicholson Baker |
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0b458f2
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The two plants had a gentleman's agreement going, like the railroad companies and the real-estate speculators in the old days, whereby they progressed together up the hill and into the yard.
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Nicholson Baker |
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847dc40
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I ate a vendor's hot dog with sauerkraut (a combination whose tastiness still makes me tremble), walking fast in order to save as much of the twenty minutes of my lunch hour I had left for reading.
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Nicholson Baker |
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7d2a241
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The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
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Nicholson Baker |